To My Father and Mother, Who instilled into my mind and heart, in the days of a happy boyhood, their own love for liberty and hatred of oppression, this volume is gratefully dedicated....

Mr. Edison tells us that ninety per cent of the energy that there is in coal is lost in the present method of converting it into a usable force. May I, without being considered a croaker, say that almost the same amount of spiritual power goes to waste in our average church life? One is startled at times as he notes the manifestations of fervor and warmth in the devotional meetings of the present day, and the meagre results that follow in the transformation of society into the likeness of the ki

  "Hard work is good an' wholesome, past all doubt;   But 'tain't so, ef the mind gits tuckered out." —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Biglow Papers . A wise man of the old time, after a tour of observation, came home to say, "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such, as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter." If this report had been written by one who had

  "Slavery ain't o' nary color,     'Tain't the hide that makes it wus,   All it keers fer in a feller     'S jest to make him fill its pus." —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Biglow Papers. BOSTON, June 29, 1891. REV. Louis ALBERT BANKS, St. John's M. E. Church, South Boston, Mass. Dear Sir:—In the sermon which you preached yesterday, the title, as given in the newspapers, is " The White Slaves of Boston Sweaters ." Under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States there can be no su

  "Freedom's secret wilt thou know?—   Counsel not with flesh and blood;   Loiter not for cloak or food;   Eight thou feelest, rush to do." —RALPH WALDO EMERSON: Freedom . Among the scores of thankful letters which I have received, commenting on the discourse on "The White Slaves of the Boston Sweaters," there is one of an entirety different character, written by a distinguished writer on social questions, a gentleman for whom I have always entertained the highest respect. I should be very glad

"Can the heart be deformed, and contract incurable ugliness and infirmity under the pressure of disproportionate misfortune, like the spine beneath too low a vault?" —VICTOR HUGO: Les Miserables . The Klamath Lake Indians in Oregon have a strange and weird fashion of mourning their dead. They dig a hole in the ground, and roof it over with willows, which they cover with dirt, forming a sort of underground cabin. In case of death in the family, the relatives go into this dug-out, which is called

  "When the toiler's heart you clutch,   Conscience is not valued much;   He recks not a bloody smutch     On his gold;   Everything to you he defers,   You are potent reasoners;   At your whisper Treason stirs,     Hunger and Cold!" When Henry W. Grady, the brilliant Southern orator, was in Boston on his last visit, only a few weeks before his sad and untimely death, he charmed us all by his entrancing word-picture of a happy country home. The fields, the lowing kine, the well-appointed farmhou

  "Face to face with shame and insult     Since she drew her baby breath,   Were it strange to find her knocking     At the cruel door of death?   Were it strange if she should parley     With the great arch fiend of sin?" —ALICE CARY: The Edge of Doom. I have been asked to give a reason for the faith that is in me in regard to certain painful charges made by me in a recent sermon on Wages and Morals—to the effect that the persons high in authority in some respectable Boston stores regard favora

  "That each should in his house abide,   Therefore was the world so wide." —RALPH WALDO EMERSON: Fragments of Nature and Life. When, over one-half of our land, there hung the black pall of African slavery, no other one thing, perhaps, did more to reveal the terrible cruelty of the system, and to arouse the indignation of the civilized world, than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In June, 1882, when the elite of American literature gathered at Boston to celebrate her seventieth birth

  "Ring in the valiant man and free,     The larger heart, the kindlier hand;     Ring out the darkness of the land,   Ring in the Christ that is to be." —ALFRED TENNYSON: In Memoriam. The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a genuine sympathy which was illustrated in his carefully searching out the causes of their troubles. There

  "There is a poor blind Samson in this land,     Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,   Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,     And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,   Till the vast temple of our liberties     A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies." —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The Warning . Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see,

  "And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee,   An image of Him who died on the tree;     * * * * *   Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;   Behold, through Him, I give to thee!'" —James Russell Lowell: Sir Launfal . "Now there was a certain rich man and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously every day: and a certain beggar named Lazarus was laid at his gate full of sores." "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me." These two views

  "There is no caste in blood,   Which runneth of one hue, nor caste in tears,   Which trickled salt with all." Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln, who has given a large amount of time and painstaking interest to the treatment of the paupers, and who deserves more credit than any one else for the present hopeful campaign in their behalf, writes as follows in the Boston Transcript of August 28:— "Those of your readers who were kind enough to follow in your columns, last winter, the articles for which you cour

  "When wealth no mere shall rest in mounded heaps.   But smit with freer light shall slowly melt   In many streams to fatten lower lands,   And light shall spread, and man be liker man   Thro' all the seasons of the golden year." No one who is in touch with the throbbing life of this time can fail to perceive that this is an age peculiarly given up to the worship of Mammon. The literature of our day bears certain evidence of this fact. Scribner's Magazine of last year contained, under the title